Tuesday, June 26, 2012

CM9 RC2 for Epic has been released. Unfortunately, it has a major bug where it fails to retain addon .zip's, causing folks to have problems like broken gapps or losing Sprint VVM after they upgrade. You are fine if you manually flash addons immediately after upgrading RC2. You may want to wait for the next release if you want a stable experience.

One cause of the keyboard backlight failing to turn on when desired has been fixed. It is possible other causes have not been fixed. Please report if you continue to run into issues with the keyboard backlight.

Switch from binary libsensor to source-built libsensor from aries. Theoretically it should behave identical to the old libsensor. Please report any differences you notice with sensors.

Rescaled signal levels to fit AOSP's signal bar thresholds. It should be roughly equivalent to the behavior in beta4. Please report if you experience any major problems with signal bar behavior.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

noobnl got the crespo4g modem (from the Nexus S 4G) to mostly work on Epic 4G, allowing CM9 to Update PRL and Profile natively for the first time! Currently it has stability problems that noobnl is attempting to fix. This is very experimental and unstable so no test builds are available yet.

If public testing of the crespo4g modem on Epic 4G does commence, it will initially be for advanced users only. Flashing the crespo4g modem means you cannot use any other ROM on your phone. Even temporary stock from sdcard will no longer work. Users will need to know how to manually flash the crespo4g or Epic 4G modem with Odin or Heimdall in order to safely test the upcoming test CM9 builds.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

CyanogenMod's Team Epic is proud to announce the release of CM9 beta4 for Sprint's Samsung Epic 4G. CM9 beta4 is contains mainly new features merged into CM9 since beta3. Please follow us on Google+ andFacebook as we post the latest news and test builds there quite often.

There appears to be a bug during calls where the mic recording gets disabled as the CPU goes to sleep. Waking the phone with the power key re-enables the mic. Calls are not dropped and you are still able to hear the other person, but they obviously won't hear you. Using an app like Softlocker to disable deep sleep allows the mic to function continuously during the call.

Proximity sensor fails to operate the screen after above mentioned suspend issue, until manually reactivating the sensor or after initiating a new call session.

Update 5/17/2012: Call audio is now working.

Update 5/11/2012: Wifi is now working.

What Works

Haptic Feedback

Call Audio

Wifi

SDCard

USB Mass Storage

3g & Text Messaging

GPS

Light/Proximity Sensor

Bluetooth, A2DP

Ringtones, Notification Sounds, Media Audio (Speaker & Headset)

Incoming/Outgoing Calls

Recovery Mode

adb

Keyboard

Touchscreen & Softkeys

Autobrightness

Capacitive backlight timeout

Camera Snapshots (Front and Back)

Video Recording

Screenshots

/system, /data, /cache mounted as mtd/yaffs2

Suspend/Resume

Charging

What Doesn't Work Yet

WiMAX - In progress.

Headphone mic (need to confirm)

More to add as we find it

Bugs

Capacitive key backlights become dim at some point (happens after first suspend).

Phone enters deep sleep while on charger. (might have been a fluke, need to confirm)

Charge LED does not stay lit with screen off. (Presumably when enters deep sleep)

Powered off device on charger will automatically boot up (Permanent flash only)

Links

Temporary kexec test kernel instructions:
Files last updated: 6/23/2012
Note: The orientation sensor should work if you are on Beta5-pre1 or newer. If north is pointing the wrong direction, consider a quick calibration as seen here:

IMPORTANT: The phone's stock browser saves zImage as zImage.bin. You *must* rename it back to zImage.

Please test anything in the list above, whether we specify it working or not. If something isn't working fully, or not working at all, please let us know in a comment. Anytime you want to go back to your normal kernel, just reboot the phone.

CyanogenMod's Team Epic is proud to announce the release of CM9 beta3 for Sprint's Samsung Epic 4G. Please follow us on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter for the latest news. This release contains many new features and significant bug fixes!

Release Notes

IMPORTANT! Before you upgrade to CM9 beta3, DO THIS to prevent possible issues.

Due to the success of EpicCM and the generous support of the Epic 4G community, we were able to recruit many developers and non-dev leaders to help with QA testing, documentation and answering questions. This has allowed us to purchase additional dev phones in order to aid development of Epic Touch, Nexus S 4G and Sprint Galaxy Nexus. We also have productive teamwork with Epic 4G's AOKP developer Alias8818, allowing us fix bugs faster in both CM9 and AOKP. We are now continuing fund raising to purchase additional dev phones including Sprint's upcoming SGS3.

kernel-3.0.x News

One of our long-term goals is port a newer 3.0.x kernel work on Epic, and to maintain that kernel together with the very similar hardware of the Nexus S 4G. KalimAz (CyanogenMod's maintainer of Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus) received an Epic 4G in Spain on May 3rd. Now KalimAz, mkasick and bbelos are slowly getting closer on this goal, most recently they were working on fixing the wifi driver.

The ability to customize look and feel of CM9 to user choice using predefined themes or community driven user inspired ideas. Preview the theme before applying to make sure its exactly what your looking for in a theme before applying to the phone.

Lockscreen Shortcuts

Allows you to choose lock screen shortcuts (1-5) anything from browser, Facebook, twitter and messaging, the choice is yours, with customizable icon's.

Capacitive Buttons/Keyboard Backlight Disable Option

One of the most exciting new features in CM9 beta3 for Epic 4G is the ability to disable the capacitive touchkey backlights. Unlike other phones with multiple brightness levels, the touchkey lights on Epic 4G have only on and off. Using the Epic in the dark would be often annoying as the touchkey lights are blindingly bright.

Settings > Advanced > Disable Touchkey Lights turns off lights after a 750ms delay since you last touched it. We designed it this way on purpose so the user has enough time to recognize the location identity of the four buttons.

Settings > Display > Automatic backlight > Edit other levels... allows you to further customize when touchkey lights and even the keyboard backlight will be enabled based upon the light sensor levels. 0 means off and 255 means on.

Unique Bluetooth MAC Address Fix

Previously Epic CM9 used a generic MAC address instead of a unique per-device MAC address. Since the bluetooth address has changed, all users must re-pair their bluetooth devicesbefore they may be used again. This resolves several known issues with some newer bt devices.

Gallery Photo GPS Fix

All previous versions of CM9 for Epic 4G would an erroneous date of 1969 in the photo EXIF data if you have GPS enabled at the time of taking the photo. This would cause the Gallery app to become confused and display photos in the wrong order. All new photos taken by the Camera of CM9 for Epic 4G will no longer have this issue. bbelos and Cyc of Team Epic wrote this tool and instructions for fixing your older photos.

Conservative Overclocking

CyanogenMod aims for maximum stability, so we have decided to include only the most conservative overclocking and no undervolting in the standard CM9 kernel. Undervolting is known to work 99.99% of the time, but rare timings involving certain apps can cause the phone to spontaneously reboot. It is our belief that many reports of random reboots are the result of unsafe overclocking or undervolting. We will not ship the means for users to shoot themselves in the foot in the default operating system.

We have added only the 1.2GHz step, disabled by default. You enable it in Settings > Performance > Processor > Maximum CPU frequency. Since voltages cannot be changed, no add-on tools like Voltage Control are necessary.

While 1.2Ghz maximum seems to be stable for most users, we do not recommend using it if you care about maximizing stability.

Smoother cpufreq scaling

All previous kernels have had trouble where it would no longer use the 100MHz step if you have changed your cpufreq or governor settings. Major fixes were made to the kernel to allow cpufreq to scale more smoothly. As a result, the cpufreq governors now behave differently. The powersave governor has been removed as it causes extreme slowness, failures and consequential higher battery consumption.

GPS Navigation and Google Maps Fix

CM9 beta2 added emulation for RotationVectorSensor2. Unfortunately this exposed a race condition that can cause sensors to entirely deadlock, the cause of the rare reports of GPS Navigation failures we have been hearing lately. beta3 contains teamhacksung's fix to the magnetometer driver to prevent this failure.

If your GPS was already broken in CM9 beta2, you may need to uninstall and reinstall Google Maps in order to fix it.

Camera Timer

The Camera app now has the ability to set a countdown timer before a photo is taken. While in the Camera, hit the Settings button, then the action bar (three dots), then tap the camera button. The on-screen camera button will turn red and you will see a red countdown in the top left. When it reaches zero it will take a photo.

The team is is now fixing bugs to prepare for CM9 beta3 for Epic 4G. A great many bugs have already been fixed and new features are working! If you follow us on Google+ you can help us to test builds as we approach release. Epic 4G is still a great phone and this team will continue to update CyanogenMod to support it for the foreseeable future.

In an unusual but highly successful move, we have invited Alias8818 of Epic 4G AOKP to collaborate on common issues as a member of Team Epic. This has turned out to be a healthy partnership as we have learned about fixes in AOKP to merge into CM, and AOKP relies on CM for device bug fixes.

If you appreciate our work, please consider supporting our team with a tiny contribution of $5. We are currently saving up reserves to purchase Sprint's upcoming SGS3 for our lead developers, as we believe it will be the best Android phone on Sprint. We sincerely hope it will have a slider keyboard like the first generation SGS Epic 4G, but even without a keyboard it will be an awesome phone that we want CyanogenMod to work well with.

Monday, May 7, 2012

All pictures taken since the start of CM9 for the Epic have contained invalid GPS data that have affect how the pictures are shown in Gallery, this caused photos to appear out of order as Gallery thinks they were taken in year 1969. Additionally there were previously issues with removable storage but people's thumbnails were still incorrect and not matching their respective pictures. Also Beta2 and earlier suffered from an issue where if CPU minimum and maximum frequencies were modified they would lose 100Mhz setting so the phone would idle at 200MHz instead of dropping to 100MHz when idle.

Beta 3 has all these issues resolved but the pictures already taken are still affected as well as settings saved for the processor.

This patch does the following:

Removes ALL GPS data from CM9 and CM7 pictures

Pictures taken with Touchwiz ROMs are not affected

Pictures taken with GPS Location ON with Beta 3 and newer as well as CM7 WILL lose GPS data from those pictures if they are not backed up elsewhere before flashing!

Clears Gallery's thumbnail cache and databases so it can rescan all the images fresh

Gallery may show some of your pictures with GPS data in details but that is just stored in the database and not in the file and will be lost after the script is ran.

Wipes the /data/system/throttle folder so CPU governor and states will start at default frequencies

Depending on the number of pictures this can take several minutes. I recommend keeping the phone plugged in while running to ensure the process is not interrupted.

Time stamps shown by Gallery will be off by your Time Zone (-4 hours to -6 hours here in the US). This is a bug affecting all android OSes to present and is NOT device specific. Even with the time-stamps being off the pictures have the correct order and will be read correctly when uploaded to the web or other devices.

Coming soon: An optional kernel with a 1.2ghz step. There are some code conflicts to work out between the CM9 kernel implementation and the CM7 kernel, mostly due to the aggressive memory work for CM9. Check back later for status.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Utility for CM9 / CM10 Epic 4G
This is a temporary ROM that boots Samsung's FC09 firmware entirely from sdcard without making any changes to the ROM installed on your phone. Simply reboot to return to your normal ROM. This sdcard ROM is useful for several purposes.